Temple

Friday 13 October, 1307, is a date that echoes across history, spawning a deep-seated superstition about any Friday 13th. On that day, Philip IV, King of France, arrested hundreds of Knights Templar in France. Philip had been out to get the Templars since 1302. This had nothing to do with the global mythology that has since grown up around the Knights Templar, and it especially had nothing to do with the Holy Grail: it was simply that, as one of the richest organisations in Europe, the Templars had turned down a demand from Philip for a loan he needed to further his military adventures.

His campaign against the Templars extended to kidnapping Pope Boniface VIII in September 1303, and possibly poisoning his successor, Benedict XI in July 1304. In 1305 Philip finally got a Pope who would see things his way, when a Frenchman who had been a childhood friend became Pope Clement V. By 13 October 1307 Philip felt his position was strong enough for him to move against the Templars in France, arresting their members and seizing their treasury and assets.

Confessions of heresy and a wide range of other invented crimes forced out of the arrested French Templars gave Philip IV the ammunition he needed to try to persuade Pope Clement V that the Order should be suppressed worldwide. Clement V finally succumbed to the pressure, and issued an Edict to dissolve the Templars after the Council of Vienna in 1312. Templar properties and assets in countries previously sympathetic to them were seized, in many cases being transferred to the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. At the same time, many Knights Templar who had not already gone to ground were put on trial and executed. It had taken ten years for Philip to get even with the Templars, but get even he certainly had.

In Scotland, King Robert the Bruce, himself under excommunication from the Church after his murder of the Red Comyn, was less inclined than most European monarchs to rigorously enforce all aspects of the Papal Edict dissolving the Templars. As elsewhere, their Scottish lands and properties, such as Temple itself and the church at Tullich, were transferred to the Knights of St John, but there was little persecution of individual members of the Order in Scotland, and many Knights Templar were allowed simply to become Knights of St John.

Since they had first been established in Scotland by David I in 1153, the main Scottish base of the Knights Templar had been 15 miles south of Edinburgh at a place called Balantradoch. Here they had a monastery on the east bank of the River South Esk. In 1312 ownership of the monastery was transferred to the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John, and became part of the property they administered from their Scottish headquarters at Torphichen Preceptory near Linlithgow.

During the 1500s Balantradoch came to be known as Temple, reflecting its earlier history.